(Newser)
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Senior campaign adviser Charlie Black drew fire recently when he suggested that a terror attack would help John McCain, but maybe we shouldn’t have been so surprised. Black’s past is littered with questionable associations, Thomas Frank writes in the Wall Street Journal, with comrades from a 1970s young-conservatives group having chalked up quite a questionable record in the years since.

Black went on to co-found the National Conservative Political Action Committee, the group that put slime-slinging “independent” groups on the map. After that, his lobbying firm became embroiled in scandal, accused of using political favors to waste taxpayer money. So what binds Black’s motley array of pals? “A persistent derision for the notion that government might someday be conducted on the level.”